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March 13, 2015

As a follow on to my piece Boomer Roomers a friend asked me to do an executive summary of what such a project would be about. What follows is a lightly-edited version of that summary. If anyone is interested in working with me on this project, just drop me a line. I’ll be working on the business plan.

A friend and I have been talking about the problems of aging and long term care. I just turned 60. I am still in great health, still working. I am fortunate

But you know what my biggest problem is right now? Making new friends. Finding people who share my interests and outlook. That’s what makes the difference between a long, fulfilling retirement and a short, painful one.

This brings up a story I like to tell. What’s the best thing that can happen? What’s the worst thing that can happen?

For my parents, the worst thing that could happen is my dad (right) won the lottery. He won $189,000 when he was about 65, about when this picture was taken.

Dad only had friendships at work, at his lock shop, so my brother came in and got to “invest” the money in various schemes aimed at growing the business (about which he knew nothing). The money disappeared. My dad had to close the place. He felt guilty. He had no friends. He lost interest in life. He died shortly after.

March 06, 2015

With every generation in American politics, there is a new industry driving the train.

In the last generation it was oil. Before that, manufacturing. Before that, utilities. Before that, banking. Ever since we ceased to be an agrarian nation, with the outbreak of the Civil War, American politics have been driven by the scene of a rising industry, a ruling industry, and a falling one.

Consider my own time, the era of the Nixon Thesis, 1969-2009. The manufacturing industry was falling, as Detroit was hollowed out. The oil industry was ruling, as Houston and Dallas gave us Presidents and wars over resources. The technology industry was rising, with kids my own age named Gates and Jobs becoming multi-billionaires, and with the Web being spun.

After leaving ZDNet in 2010, my first task was to cover renewable energy, which is the application of technology to power. Oil is based on the idea that you find stuff you can burn, deep underground, you bring it to the surface and you burn it to create power.

Solar and wind have a different set of economics. You create a machine to harvest energy that already exists, all around us. That device remains in place, harvesting energy, for years, decades even. The capital cost of the machine is recovered over time, and the energy produced after it’s paid for is, in essence, free.

February 27, 2015

I turned 60 this year. Which means the very heart of the Baby Boom – the Steve Jobs-Bill Gates heart of it – is also turning 60 this year.

It’s painful. My back hurts. My wife’s knees hurt. Everyone around us is talking about their health, their retirement plans, or their grandchildren. It sucks.

And it’s going to suck harder, because age has a way of dealing with all pride, and is a route toward a final end. My mom is 91. She has dementia. I call her at the home she’s staying at and sometimes she doesn’t know who I am. Such is life. No one gets out of it alive.

This is not just a personal moan, however. It’s a huge societal shift, and a major business opportunity. That’s because we Baby Boomers think we invented everything, and there are just so damned many of us. We’re the “pig in the python” – a giant cohort born of the ashes of WWII into a world of prosperity we first rejected, then turned to with a vengeance, and that we’re leaving for our kids and grandkids to clean up.

February 20, 2015

The biggest life change in decades is now beginning. We are leaving an age of bundled, curated video content and entering an age of self-selected, self-curated content.

The unbundling of cable, the decision of millions to go “over the top” and choose instead to get their entertainment directly from the Internet, is one of the great sea changes of this decade, driven by rising costs and (perhaps more important) a shortage of time. Lost may be serendipity, the decision to watch things because they are on.

Today, for instance, I watched George Englund’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, a 1968 MGM film in which Anthony Quinn plays a radical cross between Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis, renouncing communism and wealth at the same time in the name of secular decency. Given that it was made early in the pontificate of Paul VI (John Gielgud gets one scene playing a nice version of Paul, then dies to make way for the plot) it is many decades ahead of its time. (Quinn’s character is even proclaimed a cardinal from Lvov, which is in western Ukraine, and a starving China drives the plot.) But it’s not what I would be watching if I had the whole world to choose from.

February 13, 2015

The event was symbolic of a larger change going on in the economy, and thus in politics. Oil would be replaced by technology. Power, and responsibility, would move from Houston to Silicon Valley. The Kochs would fall, the Google guys would rise.

Of course, Silicon Valley hasn’t always been a liberal bastion. The original leaders of Silicon Valley were Republican. David Packard was an assistant secretary of defense under Nixon, during Vietnam. The Valley was always more about Apollo 13 than Woodstock. The Internet was a Cold War activity.

February 06, 2015

A lot of people like to say these days that America is no longer a democracy. True, absent a crisis, and it has always been true. Most of the time, most people don’t care. Democracy, for most of us, is a gun we keep locked in the drawer.

And that is actually fine. If you’re not motivated to vote, you’re voting for the ways things are, you’re voting “yes” on whatever those who do vote wind up voting for. If you don’t vote, then bitch-and-moan that “we’re not a democracy” and “my vote doesn’t count,” you’re an idiot. Because it’s the opportunity to vote that matters.

But there is an area where in the last several decades we have lost democracy, and seem to have lost any hope of getting it back. That’s in corporations.

January 30, 2015

We are now 7 years removed from the Great Crisis that brought us Barack Obama. (We are also no further removed in time from the movie poster at the right was from the end of the war it portrayed.)

For those keeping score at home, that means we are now playing the 1939 game, as that year provides the best analogy to our time.

In 1939, the world was slouching toward war. The West had returned to the austerity policies, negative growth and deflation of the crisis because bankers were back to making policy, and bankers don’t understand that money is a verb.

The bad guys of the time got this. Hitler ignored the bankers and re-armed his country. So did Japan. So did Italy. They demanded that money be spent, they directed it be spent on arms, and in the course of spending that money the economies of the Fascists grew rapidly.

In our time, bankers have far more control of the world than they did then, so austerity and deflation are more widespread. Austerity rules Europe, it dominates the U.S., and it’s becoming increasingly popular in China.

Only Vladimir Putin is prepared to ignore this reality and put money to work. He has sunk his currency, sunk his economy, but he has spent, believing that aggressive wars to win territory can succeed.

January 23, 2015

Some 20 years ago, when the Web was still being spun, my editor and I at Interactive Age saw the Internet ushering into a golden age of freedom.

(The kid on the right in this picture is me, with my dad, who passed in 1999, at the wedding of my younger sister. Just wanted to see him again.)

The online world makes liberty binary, we argued. It’s on or it’s off. Economic growth demands that it be on, so it’s going to be on. We became among the earliest cyber-libertarians.

But human nature is not binary. It’s analog. There are degrees of good and evil in all of us. And the Internet, as part of the human world, must respond to that. It’s a misunderstanding of this fact that is at the heart of cyber-libertarian dismay with (even hatred of) the Obama Administration.

The fact is that we’ve entered an era of Cyber War. The Internet has become the focus of the key struggle of our age, between modernity and medievalism. Groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda know that the best-and-fastest way to go after the U.S. and its allies is through the Internet. North Korea has demonstrated this beyond a doubt.

January 16, 2015

One of the most important sports stories in decades is unfolding just miles from my home and hardly anyone is covering it. No one is covering it right.

That story is the Atlanta Hawks, our local basketball team. There are NBA fanatics who know the team is having a grand season so far, the “Beast of the East” at the regular season’s halfway point, with just 8 losses.

But when I went to New York this week and asked folks about the Hawks, they just shrugged their shoulders, insisting the team will “come back to Earth,” implying they’re doing it with mirrors. Maybe, one “expert” said, they will make the conference finals this year.

In the year 1436 the Renaissance was just getting started. The Reformation had not yet begun. Columbus hadn't even been born.

That’s the year we’re now on in the Muslim calendar. The Catholic Church, in this case based in Arabia, reigns Supreme against an Orthodox Church based in Iran.

To modern eyes it all looks barbaric, but it’s in line with Christianity’s own history. As Europe Christianized it also devolved. The Muslim World dominated “technology” and trade for the first 500 years after the prophet, and then entered a dark time of internecine warfare that has lasted from that time to this, with various forces seeking dominance based – at least in part – on how orthodox they could be, on how hard they could make it for “true believers” to consider themselves true.